Dan Scott’s job is a dream for Disney fans and audiophiles. The Recording Arts and Entertainment Business grad has spent almost 20 years creating audio and music for rides, live shows, nighttime spectaculars, and more at Disney’s theme parks and cruise ships. Dan’s won a Daytime Emmy award for sound mixing, designed audio for every Disney park around the world, and made decades of memories doing what he loves.
Taking Off at Ty Fy Studios
Dan’s career kicked off with a post-college internship at the Disney Live Entertainment Music Department in Florida, where he connected with Dan Fontana, a fellow Full Sail grad. That relationship turned into a 15-year career at Fontana’s Ty Fy Studios, a full-service audio production company. During his time at Ty Fy, Dan did a great deal of contract work with Disney and won a Daytime Emmy award for Outstanding Sound Mixing for Disney’s Broadway Hits at Royal Albert Hall, a show that he recorded and mixed for the BBC and Disney+.
“[For the show at Albert Hall], we had the 70-piece BBC Concert Orchestra, we had a giant choir, we had six leads from various years of Disney theatrical musicals, and we had a big revue show,” Dan says. “I went to London and took about 200 channels off the stage to a production truck and recorded the whole thing along with the live sound designer. Then I brought it back to Orlando to mix at Disney Studios and [it was released on] BBC Radio in stereo, then Broadway HD, then I got to remix it again in Atmos for Disney+.”
Dan continued working with Ty Fy on a range of projects, including music for Disney’s Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser hotel. Along with the Walt Disney Imagineering music team, Dan co-produced eight hours of new music for the live-action role-playing experience to create an immersive environment for guests.
“We had 25 different songwriters writing songs that we produced and recorded and mixed,” Dan shares. “We went to LA and got with the team from Skywalker Sound and from Lucasfilm to add extra layers of new and authentic Star Wars audio. They brought dictionaries of all the different Star Wars languages, and we were recording verses and raps [in those languages]. We just made it weird and it worked really well.”
Continuing to Create at Audio By The Bay
After more than a decade working with Ty Fy in Florida, Dan returned to his home state of New York in 2020. He’s currently running the East Coast division of Audio By The Bay, a music and audio production company that specializes in soundtracks for theme parks and other live sound design projects. Through Audio By The Bay and parent company Forward Thinking Designs, Dan’s doing even more projects for Disney Parks and other immersive themed experiences.
Dan’s work touches every part of the audio production process. He helps figure out how an attraction’s music and soundscapes will support its grand ideas, plans recording sessions, works with composers and producers, designs sound effects, mixes the audio in different formats, and works on site to make sure that the final result melds seamlessly with the attraction’s visual elements. Creating music and audio that meets a theme park’s unique sound requirements is part of the gig.
“When you’re in a theme park, the noise floor of everything going on outside can easily sit around 85 decibels, and you don’t really want to spend a whole lot of time being much louder than that [with the music]… You have to figure out other ways to get impact on the soundtrack without volume, because the human brain starts tuning things out if you just hear a static, loud sound for a long time. So to have a 15-minute show or a 20-minute show that still makes you feel something by the end of it, instead of just being overstimulated the whole time, that’s the challenge,” he explains.
“And across the show, we can have an orchestral overture turn into a bluegrass song, into a pop song, into an EDM song, back to orchestra, into a ballad. It goes all the way across the gamut of genre and style, and you’ve got to make it all sound [unified],” Dan continues. “And now that video projection is involved in pretty much everything we do, you have to support what’s going on visually with sound effects or with accents in the music, and you have to make it all feel like one cohesive thing so it doesn’t sound like someone just pressed play on a boombox while they’re showing something on TV.”
Dan’s finesse with music and audio has made an impact on some impressive projects. He’s worked on Disney Hercules, a Broadway-style show on the Disney Destiny cruise ship; nighttime spectaculars like Harmonious and Luminous: The Symphony of Us at EPCOT and World of Color Happiness! at Disneyland; Rock ’n’ Roller Coaster Starring the Muppets, and a range of other rides and attractions. His work is featured in Disney parks around the world, from Orlando and California to Shanghai, Hong Kong, and beyond. One of the projects he’s proudest of is the new Disney Cascade of Lights nighttime spectacular at Disneyland Paris.
“[The new Cascade of Lights show] came out really, really well. And it’s a different experience for a nighttime show than most because it’s a smaller venue, so you’re closer in proximity and it’s just full of drones and fountains and fireworks,” Dan says. “The whole audience feels like they’re involved. And part of that is the sound coming from all directions and a nice, enveloping mix. It’s got a great selection of music, and it’s a really fun show.”
Over the course of his career, Dan’s gone from being a Disney fan with a dream of working in audio to a full-fledged sound professional with decades of Disney projects under his belt. He says that saying “yes” helped him carve out the career he’s enjoying now.
“Our job didn’t really exist in the way it does now before we started doing it. It evolved with us, because everything just starts out with saying yes when other people are saying no. If someone asks you for something new and you think you can figure it out, say yes. Then when you succeed at it, you’re not just succeeding where others are failing – you’re succeeding where others didn’t even try, and it becomes something new, and then it becomes the norm, and you become the guy.”
